Not long ago, I bore witness to a small thing that many would consider sweet, and others would regard as ominous, even sinister. It was a Sunday, I was attending a small evangelical church, and the 50 or so people there were singing an upbeat contemporary Christian song accompanied by a decent electronic sampler with a built-in drum machine.

Having been raised amidst scathes of Scandinavians, I’ve never been inclined toward the demonstrative customs of Southern Baptists and other evangelicals, to say nothing of the rump-shaking ebullience of the Brazilian contingent at this particular church. But their enthusiasm is contagious, and it does not take many cheerful cries of “Oh gloria!” before one finds one’s lips beginning to curl, not in contempt, but in appreciation for an expression of defiant joy piercing the darkness of a fallen world.

The small, sweet thing I saw that morning was a pair of little hands belonging to a young girl, lifted up in praise in the unconscious imitation of the adults and older children around her. She was beautiful, only 2- or 3-years old, her eyes were closed and she swayed to the music as she sat in her seat. She was too young to understand the significance of her gesture, just as she was too young to understand how unusual it was to see people from at least five different cultures worshipping together, or to know how seldom one sees a black man embracing a white man and greeting him as his brother.

She was not, however, too young for the gesture to be without meaning.

Lean’s “Collectanea,” a 19th-century collection of Elizabethan proverbs, contains a maxim it ascribes to the Jesuits: “Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.” In like manner, Vladimir Lenin said: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

All around the world, parents are stunned and dismayed by the actions of the educational bureaucracy. Germans are again fleeing from their government into France and Switzerland as officials announce they will take children away from parents who refuse to turn them over to the state-mandated schools. California parents are reeling from the recent decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which asserts that parents’ have no right to control how the public schools educate their children. In Texas, parents are angrily protesting their children being medicated by school personnel against their wishes.

However, these despicable actions should come as a surprise only to the ignorant – who are clearly the great majority – since only an ignoramus or a fool would voluntarily pass his children through the pagan fires of the public schools.

The Association of California School Administrators is reported to have issued the following statement:

“Parent choice” proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained.

It is perhaps apocryphal – I could not find an original publication to cite here – but in it one hears a distinct echo of the man who established the first public kindergarten and was the U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1899 to 1906. In “The Philosophy of Education,” William Torey Harris let the cat out of the bag by asserting that the entire point of public education is “the subsumption of the individual.”

This is why Marx, Lenin and Hitler were all supporters of public schooling in their attempts to permanently secure the individual’s services for the State. The standing in line, the bullying, the drudgery and boredom of the mind-numbing daily school routine is not incidental to the education of the schoolchild, it is the education. Contrary to what most parents believe, it is actually reading, writing and arithmetic that are entirely incidental to the true purpose of public school – subservience is the “socialization” of which educationists correctly complain that homeschooled children lack.

The homeschooling movement was inevitable, as it is only a symptom of the fundamental conflict between Christianity and the utilitarian collectivism that lies below the surface of the public-school system. The little girl who raises her hands to praise the Son of God who loved her enough to die for her will never buy into the lie that she is nothing more than an insignificant and eminently replaceable cog in the great machine of the collective. She is an immortal soul, a creature of eternity who cannot be subsumed.

The latest battle for the minds of the next generation’s schoolchildren has barely begun, but the result is already certain. Nero failed. Lenin failed. Hitler failed, and so, too, will the American educationists and their evil school system. If the gates of Hell will not triumph against the Church, then what chance do the NEA minions infesting your local Molochian altar have?